This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Is this the beginning of the end for empty patches of land in Toronto?

Baseball is back, at least in places with a protective dome, and it has unleashed the annual wave of romanticism for a sport that’s rich with lore. Part of the long affection for baseball is that anybody could play it: expensive equipment isn’t needed, just a bat, a ball and space.

In the mythology of baseball that space was often just an empty lot, allowing for “sandlot” games, a looser version that adapted to surroundings and didn’t require a proper ball diamond. Sandlot baseball is easiest in places that are just being built, like new subdivisions where all the houses aren’t constructed at once, or places in decline where buildings come down and aren’t replaced.

Graduate students from the U.S. visit the Unilever building and climb to the roof for a view of the land near the BMW dealership off of Eastern Ave., which they are redesigning. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star)

Toronto’s 20 years of boom times have made empty lots an endangered species here, relative to other places. With real estate so valuable an empty lot tends not to stay that way for long, though there are exceptions. One large one along the lower Don River has been getting some attention of late.

As profiled in the Star last weekend, a 16-acre parcel of land bordered by Eastern Ave., the Don River and the rail corridor that carries GO and Via trains along the Lakeshore East line, is the focus of The Hines Student Competition for graduate students run by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a non-profit organization that advocates for responsible land use and the creation of sustainable communities. This is the first Canadian site in the competition’s history.

The most visible landmark on the site today is the tall BMW dealership that hoists cars and SUVs up several storeys so drivers on the Don Valley Parkway can see them. It’s only in big cities with valuable land that car dealerships elevate their cars to this extent, though the building is still surrounded by sprawling parking lots.

Toronto, like many cities, devoured itself in the latter half of the 20th Century by creating parking lots where there were once buildings, life and people. In Toronto we’re lucky because the boom has largely filled in our lots with new chunks of city again, though some have remained. While the BMW building looks rather space age cool, as if it’s selling flying cars to the Jetson family, on the ground there’s little urban about it and with the dense Riverside neighbourhood to the north and the set-for-redevelopment Unilever soap factory site just over the tracks to the south, it’s ripe for redevelopment.

Across the Don River is also Corktown Common, a park just three years old but one that seems indispensable now: it immediately became an integral part of the city. Images the ULI students created showcasing their plans for the new site include bridges connecting the two sides of the river, though the Don Valley Parkway seems to disappear in most of their renderings, perhaps buried or covered over with parkland and flood-control berms.

Students check out the empty lot for the first time in person. (Steve Russell)

The local politics of removing, burying, or rebuilding urban freeways aside, some of the student projects embrace the abandoned Eastern Ave. bridge that still crosses the river. When the DVP was created in the 1960s, Eastern was diverted north and combined with Adelaide and Richmond Sts. to cross the rail corridor, the river and DVP.

Article Continued Below

A stub of what was Eastern runs along the north side of the BMW dealership where it’s been renamed Sunlight Park Rd., a reference to the Toronto Baseball Grounds and Sunlight Park baseball stadium, itself a reference to the soap works to the south, that was opened here in 1886. You really can’t escape baseball when talking about empty and underused urban lots.

The old Eastern Ave. bridge is such a wonderful relic and one of our most unique empty “lots.” Though behind a chain-link fence, ample holes have been created along the Don Valley recreation trail providing semi-clandestine access. The site of the occasional late night music party in the past, walking on it provides a close-up view of the speeding (or idling) traffic on the DVP, and should be incorporated into any future development here.

The ULI student project is similar to other design competitions, though the $50,000 (U.S.) prize certainly is exceptional, as speculative assignments like this are common in design and architecture schools. A few years ago when I was teaching a city design course at OCAD called “Cities for People,” the final project I gave students was to find an underused patch of land in one of Toronto’s less famous neighbourhoods, study that neighbourhood to see who lives here and what the needs might be, then propose something for the site that reflects the neighbourhood identity.

In a Toronto of rapid development, projects like these aren’t entirely moot exercises as change can happen, so providing good ideas, especially ones that include green space and affordable housing as the ULI students are doing, can snowball into reality with enough public support.

Look at the “Green Line” proposal to turn the hydro corridor that runs north of Dupont St. from Lansdowne Ave. to Spadina Rd. into a linear park. It, too, began as just a design competition, but has since evolved into a Friends of the Green Line group who continue to build political momentum to make this project happen.

Keep an eye open in your neighbourhood, wherever it is, for empty and underused spaces that could become something else, no matter how big or small. See if your neighbours have any ideas and ask your local councillor if it’s on their radar. Then keep talking about it. This is how we can, in fact, have nice things in Toronto.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com